High school football: Panthers ditch aerial attack for ground and pound

By Ken PowersSports Correspondent

Wednesday

Sep 5, 2018 at 10:25 PMSep 5, 2018 at 10:41 PM

BARRE — High school football fans throughout the area are going to see a different Quabbin Regional offense when the Panthers open their 2018 season at 7 p.m. Thursday night at Northbridge High. Gone is the much-celebrated aerial attack, it having been replaced by a three-word style that was made famous by Rex Ryan when he coached the NFL’s New York Jets — ground and pound.

“We’re going to go with the personnel we have,” said fifth-year Quabbin coach Dave Buchanan, whose team finished 5-6 last season. “We have four kids that could all be starting running backs on most of the teams in the area so we’re going to run the ball.”

Senior Colby Smith will be the focal point, but fellow senior Derek Rohan and juniors Noah Herzig and Seth Talbot will be seen carrying the football as well. Last year Smith rushed for 442 yards and six touchdowns, and then caught another 13 touchdowns passes. He was also a standout on defense in 2017, making 35 tackles.

“Seth was our backup to Colby last year and he ran the ball really well. When Colby missed the game against Burncoat, Seth ran for 130 yards on the ground,” Buchanan said. “Noah took last year off from football to focus on powerlifting but decided to come back to football this year, I think, thanks to the poking and prodding of his teammates. Noah has had a fantastic preseason.”

A big reason for Buchanan’s switch from an air attack to a ground attack is the fact that two key components in the Panthers’ air attack the last four years — quarterback Ryan Malkowski and wide receiver Travis Lanpher — graduated in June. Smith is really the only proven skill-position player returning.

Replacing Malkowski, who has moved on to WPI — but not before finishing his high-school career by setting several school and Central Massachusetts passing marks — will be senior Zach Coffin, who just this week was named the starter, having won a preseason competition that included juniors Sam Coppolino and Greg Burnett.

The contributions of Lanpher, who also set a number of records on his way through the gates of graduation to Western New England University, will be replaced by a group of receivers, including Rohan at times, as well as juniors Deven Thomas and Jacob Warburton. And of course, Smith is always a threat out of the backfield to catch the ball.

“Colby did all of his damage out of the backfield as a pass-catching running back,” Buchanan said. “That was because we wanted to let Ryan decide where the ball was going to go. When we don’t have that experience at quarterback, to take some of the pressure off those guys, we’re going to tell them where the ball is going to go.

“The easiest way to do that is to give the ball to Colby and let Colby run,” Buchanan continued. “He has had a fairly good preseason running the ball; he looks good, and so do the other guys, they’re picking everything up quickly.”

Malkowski and Lanpher may be Quabbin’s biggest personnel losses from last year, but they’re not the only ones. Fourteen Panthers’ players participated in commencement exercises in June.

“In addition to Ryan and Travis, we also lost a lot of guys that played key roles for us on offense, defense and special teams,” Buchanan said. “Guys like Jake Robidoux and Nick Siciliano who were two-year starters on the offensive line. We also lost Nate Podbelski, a special teams guy who really stepped up when we needed him to, and Garrett Vartanian and Travis Mortell, two guys that did some nice things for us on defense. They’re all going to be tough to replace, too.”

Returning starters on offense include seniors Phil Soucy and Joe Nichols and sophomore Tristan Kemp. Soucy and Nichols will start at the tackle spots, Kemp at a guard position.

Defensively is really where the Panthers lost the most; only three starters return from that unit — Smith, Thomas (31 tackles) and Talbot (35 tackles), who all play in the defensive backfield.

“It’s nice,” Buchanan said about his group of defensive returnees. “It gives us one position group in place where we know what they can do. The rest of the defensive starters are going to be guys that are younger but have grown up in the defense.”

Buchanan has taken a positive approach to the fact that eight of the 11 starters on defense will be first-year starters.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. We have kids that have been in the defense for four years who have been on JV and got a chance to grow up in the defense we’re running,” he said. “The other kids we had playing defense had to make the adjustment two years ago on the fly. So now we have kids playing in the only defense they’ve known at the high school level, which helps. It lets them have a little bit more confidence with it, which helps them play faster. We’ve seen that a little bit in the preseason.”

Buchanan said he is going to have game captains this year rather than naming two, three or four players captains for the entire season.

“We didn’t have a lot of leadership coming back and I challenged the junior and senior classes to step up. We implemented a core value system and they’ve done a fantastic job with it,” the coach said. “Because of that I thought it would be a disservice to them by saying ‘these four kids, they are going to be our leaders,’ when I have probably 15 kids in the junior and senior class who I feel are team leaders.”

Quabbin’s schedule is no help to a team that is replacing so many starters, especially on the defensive side of the ball. In the first five weeks of the season the Panthers opponents include perennial powers Northbridge, Maynard and Littleton.

“We’re going to have to grow up fast if we want to have a chance at making the playoffs,” Buchanan said.

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